Thank God I'm Welsh

Why Wales? The fact of survival bemuses the English. Even the Welsh find it a bit odd that we should still be around to annoy. Capricious geopolitics stuck us next to the Anglo-Saxon invader from Germany who colonised the southern Britain where we used to roam. And the relationship has been a persistently colonial one: patronising incomprehension on top and angry acquiescence from below.

Sometimes the suppressed anger will out. And so... Welshman of the week turns out to be Gwilym ab Ioan with his complaint that Wales has become a dumping ground for "English oddballs, social misfits and dropouts". For the English we are deceiving charmers - and sometimes thieves, as we lurch dangerously between high spirits and melancholia. As if living in the belly of an obtuse superpower - once imperial, now economic and cultural - is supposed to be a recipe for emotional stability. We have "hwyl", or brio, all right but also a terrible "hiraeth" for what is lost - a deranging nostalgia which seeps through the soul. The ham-fisted English offering of "longing" as a translation misses the point - typically.

That English Conservatives just don't get it is unsurprising. A strain of reactionary romanticism from the novels of the Powys brothers, to Enoch Powell with his edition of the laws of Hywel Dda (medieval King Hywel the Good), has offered a minority report of appreciation. But the dominant Tory tone has been set by the crass, white-settler attitudes which spread from the Llandudno bungalow to the Cardiff villa.

But it's the sullen incomprehension of the English liberal which has the real power to rile. Pretended "progressivism" has been the most influential anti-Welsh presence in what it sees as western England. Scotland's difference it can understand and accept. But the discovery of a Welsh chasm really hurts the immigrant, because the place is so near - and because we seem to want to please.

Wales has a third-world quality in its relation to England. The anger of dependence is always there - along with a sense of shame at our own complicity as we grin away and then say, quite shamelessly, "we'll keep a welcome" in all those green valleys. What's important in the eventual backlash is not so much the words used but the rage behind them.

VS Naipaul was silly earlier this week when he attacked Forster and Keynes for using India as a cruising ground. But his real point was a deeper one - that these narrowly elitist liberals saw India through manipulating English eyes. Between the English and other cultures there intervenes too often an alienating prism which domesticates and insults the strange by making it full of "charm" and "fun".

Our cultural survival was by necessary stealth - for which we are blamed. It was a process of cultural guerrilla warfare, of samizdat activity on the hearth. What was kept was the only important thing in a country's identity - a language. And here's the rub.

The problem with the English is that they just won't assimilate - especially in language. Which is why in whole swaths of Wales, the language only survives as a ghost in the hedgerows, with the place names offering mute reminders of a dead beauty. And perhaps in the English attitude there is a suspicious jealousy - a touch of "cenfigen". Anglo-America may be culturally global, but the English can't be defined any more by their language. Wales still can.

Wales is all words. Cymraeg's natural sonority survives even in pallid English translation and can get the English goat. In Wales, appearance and reality are often at odds - and you need a touch of imagination to get it right. But if the English dropouts dropped into the language class more often there would be no problem.

Personally, a society of misfits sounds appealing. Wales is too conformist a place and our oddballs leave - as I can testify. The depressing aspect of this story is Plaid Cymru's response in forcing ab Ioan to resign as vice-president. The only important event in 20th-century Welsh politics was the establishment of Plaid Cymru. And now it is neutered into that very traditional Welsh thing - a fear of giving offence.

In Denbigh this week the National Eisteddfod, that peripatetic assertion of will for a people unsure of their home, has come to rest for a week of word play. This is the only country in the world whose central national ritual is the coronation and the enthronement of a poet. Behind the ceremonies, this latest row of words and reality will fill the tents as the traditional rain descends. Welsh complaints about the graceless English tend to be reserved for domestic consumption. At least this time, thanks to ab Ioan, we're doing it in the open.